Senior members of HTC’s design team have been detained by Taiwanese investigators on suspicion of defrauding the under-fire smartphone maker and stealing valuable IP.
HTC raised the alarm with Taiwan’s Bureau of Investigators after the suspects – including VP of product design Thomas Chien, R&D director Wu Chien Hung and design …

COMMENTS

Was this valuable IP?

"downloading info on the new Sense 6.0 UI"

Strewth, as our antipodean cousins are alleged to say, why pilfer something that is hardly worth the time of day? Maybe these jokers at the top of HTC and that sense of priority partly explains why the phones have sucked for so long.

Re: Was this valuable IP?

"If that proves to be true, it would seem that HTC’s design team haven’t grasped the concept of data loss prevention technology."

That is confirmed by their Android widgets that demand every permission available in Android (including making phone calls, sending texts and authenticating accounts among others) just to show share prices or the flippin' weather! As they're already installed you don't get to check the permissions before use as you would with a download from something like Google Play store.

When I ditched my HTC mobes I made sure I changed any account passwords I entered into them. Goodness knows how much of my data HTC has spaffed about purely because I wanted a clock on my home page.

Re: Was this valuable IP?

I wouldn't agree recent HTC phones have 'sucked'. I have a One X+, and it's great. Much better than the Galaxy in terms of build quality, and better than the iPhone for functionality and features. It never crashes, is lightning fast, has shedloads of storage and has every smartphone feature you can think of.

I think HTC's problem is confusing marketing; releasing the One X, One XL and One X+ phones at different times last year, and THEN releasing the One, for example. They also seemed to have flooded the market a bit in recent years, creating even more confusion for customers, who like to know which phones are top end, which are bottom, and which is the latest in its class. With HTC, there's too much choice.

Don't worry, they can't be long for this world, judging by the known exec departures, and now the fact that two fairly senior execs, and a senior manager were busy conducting a fraud with an apparent value of around US $70k each.

What with RIM, Nokia, and HTC all racing for the wooden spoon at the same time you have to wonder which of them will be first into the phone maker's afterlife.

I wonder if these three executives were part of the HTC group that testified to inadvertently copying Nokia's Rich Recording technology when they bought Nokia's exclusively designed HAAC microphones for use within the HTC One's "Distortion Free Recording". I wonder if, as a result of these charges, this will aid Nokia in its patent infringement suit against HTC, currently with the ITC. Clearly it puts in question how truthful they've been to the court, when it comes to stealing IP.

The supplier of the microphones obviously offered them for sale when HTC asked what parts they had for sale. HTC may have offered a bribe, who knows. But the company that broke the agreement with Nokia was STMicro.

HTC...

My HTC Amaze 4G died last week at only 18 months. It was my second HTC phone, having a T-Mobile G2 before. And my last, it was so hard to root (wires are involved) and HTC left it hanging with no support very few months after release. So HTC, dive fast!